Category: Short Story
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Re-Raising Yourself by Huina Zheng
Learning self-love can be complex, especially for me, growing up in a traditional Chinese family that favored sons. As the older sister with a younger brother, nurturing my own needs was a constant source of stress and guilt. The journey started at age eight when I took on the…
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Tail-Grabbing by Yuan Changming
Here at the exit of Mingzhu, a small train station close to Macao, after travelling ten thousand kilometers respectively from Vancouver and Melbourne, in this firefly-like moment right after five o’clock on October 12, with exactly half a century behind their long-stretched shadows and, above all, despite the enormous pressure…
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Mr. Vilbig by Joe Giordano
I swear, New York’s Board of Education swept up the teacher refuse from city schools and emptied the dustpan into P.S. 63. Other kids could rave about the teachers they looked up to, or those who had a critical influence on their lives. I only had oddballs.. Mr. Vilbig,…
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A Notary Republic by Jonathan B. Ferrini
My grandmother, Mildred, was an independent woman and an entrepreneur.As Southern California was growing by leaps and bounds in the fifties, Mildred decided to supplement her husband’s salary as a cross country trucker with jobs as a part-time waitress, taking in laundry, sewing, and cleaning houses. In addition to raising…
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Gilgamesh and Enkidu on the Other Side of History by Grace Stowe Evans
Come away to the woods, my friend. The cedars are tall and gray. Their bark cracks off them like sun-split skin. Dig a well along the river and go to sleep among the reeds. If I sleep, I will dream. The gods will rattle the earth and drum on the…
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Ice Cream Dreams by Margaret Sefton
Driving through suburban Orlando with the kids in back, windows of the unairconditioned Pontiac rolled down, all Dusty could think was “depressing.” But it wasn’t the heat that made her depressed. It was the cloudlessness. There would be no afternoon summer rain, no napping children, no early cocktail hour. Today…
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Waiting by Don Noel
Their first real conversation about death, Susan remembers, was on her sixty-fifth birthday, when they were both in ebullient good health. “Let’s be realistic,” Charlie had said. “Sooner or later, everyone dies. Later, we hope. But when it comes, let’s not prolong it.” Imagine! That was twenty-three years…
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All the Quiet Moments Within by Alyssa McClure
Cora gripped the steering wheel of her car. She couldn’t understand why all these things were hitting her so hard. She was plagued and couldn’t escape it. No matter how far away from the abuse she had run, no matter how hard she tried, it still came knocking at the…
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Lunacy by Angela Patera
with her anguished wails and the rhythmic percussion of objects crashing against the walls. In a display of resourcefulness, she most likely employed an old, rusty chair to force open the skylight and crawl out onto the rooftop. The skylight has been stuck for as long as my memory serves,…